The Man Who Walks

'A savage, surreal and very original imagination' Sunday Telegraph

A brilliant road movie (on foot) of a book

Alan Warner is the author of three previous novels: Morvern Callar, which has been filmed by Lynn Ramsay and will be released in the autumn; These Demented Lands, which won the 1998 Encore Award, and The Sopranos, which is also to be filmed.

After the scandalous theft of a pub's World Cup cash kitty, a homeless drifter pursues his eccentric uncle: 'The Man Who Walks', up into the Highlands to recover the money - a cool -27,000. The nephew's frantic, stalled progress and other bizarre diversions form this wickedly hilarious novel. But who is The Man Who Walks? Is he simply a water-carrying madman with one glass eye and a fondness for whisky and pony nuts, and who has a physiological inability to handle slopes? Or is he a savant, touched by the hand of God, wandering the back roads along ancient, ancestral tracks? And as the sinister, unstable nephew gains on The Man Who Walks, can it be that it will all end in a field and that this field is Culloden Moor?

Morvern Callar

Brutal, erotic, jarringly poetic and rich in a blood-dark humour, Morvern Callar was the spectacular debut of an utterly original Scottish writer and winner of the Somerset Maugham Award

Morvern is a brilliant creation... more than a stunning debut novel; to my mind it establishes Alan Warner as one of the most talented, original and interesting voices around

Morvern is a compelling creation; elusive, enigmatic and opaque. Both ordinary and extraordinary, she gleams out like onyx from a vivid, macabre and lyrical book

Not since Camus' The Outsider has a voice with so many angles hopped and fluttered from the pages, has a note risen to chill in its opening breath

Warner's portrait of a Scottish rave-girl is bleak, haunting and brilliantly original

Alan Warner is the author of seven novels: Morvern Callar (winner of the Somerset Maugham Award), These Demented Lands, The Sopranos, The Man Who Walks, The Worms Can Carry Me To Heaven, The Stars in the Bright Sky, which was longlisted for the 2010 Man Booker Prize; and The Deadman's Pedal (2012). He is Writer in Residence at Edinburgh University.

It is off-season in a remote Highland sea port: twenty-one-year-old Morvern Callar, a low-paid employee in the local supermarket, wakes one morning to find her strange boyfriend has committed suicide and is dead on their kitchen floor. Morvern's laconic reaction is both intriguing and immoral. What she does next is even more appalling... 
 
WINNER OF THE SOMERSET MAUGHAM AWARD

The Deadman's Pedal

Winner of the James Tait Black Fiction Prize this is ‘A wonderful reconstruction of small-town Scotland in the 1970s, a hymn to teenage innocence and an elegy for old industries and the men who worked in them – Alan Warner's best yet’ 
Herald

A delight: a boisterous, kindly, deep, sweet romp of a thing

Absolutely beautiful... As far as I'm concerned he's emerging as the William Faulkner of British fiction: somebody who's created a body of work that has not only animated a language but a period and a place... He has this incredible talent

This is the best Scottish fiction since Lanark

Morally sensitive, exquisitely written and emotionally mature

If you still haven’t read it from last year, Alan Warner’s The Deadman’s Pedal was out in paperback in this. Read it

Alan Warner is the author of six previous novels: Morvern Callar, These Demented Lands, The Sopranos, The Man Who Walks, The Worms Can Carry Me To Heaven and The Stars in the Bright Sky, which was longlisted for the 2010 Man Booker Prize. He is Writer in Residence at Edinburgh University.

Winner of the James Tait Black Fiction Prize 
 
For 16-year-old Simon Crimmons there is not a lot to do. Going nowhere, fed up with school, he leaves to work as a driver on the trains. That summer he is introduced to a world of grown-up glamour, strikes and girlfriends. When Simon falls for the ethereal, aristocratic Varie, he finds freedom and adventure but will it be at a price? Too ‘posh’ for the railways, too ‘working class’ for Varie, Simon must navigate what it means to be a man as his world is turned upside down.

The Stars in the Bright Sky

Pitch perfect, darkly comic and brimming with life - in all its squalor rage, tears and laughter - this is an unforgettable story of female friendship.

Memorably bittersweet... [with] brilliantly pitched dialogue and monologue. The final cataclysmic scene is masterly

The way that this middle-aged man manages to inhabit a gang of girls with such gusto and conviction is one of the small miracles of contemporary fiction, and Warner has done it once again

This is a snarly group picaresque, a black comedy in which Gatwick airport is like Kafka's Castle in reverse... stifling, hilarious and indelible

Warner navigates the comic, the philosophical and the socially acute like no other writer we have

Vigorous and uncannily convincing... Readers would be sorry if Warner were to have finished with these characters

You don't have to have read The Sopranos to make sense of The Stars in the Bright Sky, or to be instantly hooked by it

Readers would be sorry if Warner were to have finished with these characters

The author of The Sopranos catches up with the same cast of party-going wild girls, all beautifully imagined in pitch-perfect social satire

Warner's comic depictions of the multiple tensions that run through the group finds its masterstroke in the grotesquely deluded yet impossible to dislike Manda, who is a neat satirical cipher for modern celebrity-obsessed culture. Terrific

Warner puts these very flesh-and-blood girls into locations of almost J G Ballardish sterility, with sodium lamps, flyovers and neon-signed hotels, all described beautifully.  The way he manages to inhabit his gang of girls with such gusto is one of the small miracles of contemporary fiction

Pitch-perfect dialogue elevates this exhilarating, genuinely inspired novel into something that is, in Manda's phrase, 'dead brilliant'

Embedded in an unflinching portrayal or working-class femininity - all binge-drinking, chain-smoking, shrieking vulgarity and copious vomiting - is a brilliant anatomy of shifting group dynamics, many nods to Beckett's waiting games, and a sly engagement with Ballard's reading of airport space as the ultimate home of deracinated modernity

Warner is fascinated by the strange domesticity of 'non-places', and occasionally cranks up the alienation to describe their fixtures - literally, the light fixtures, room numbers and air-conditioning units - with a nouveau roman blankness... The most striking passages of the novel are in this clunky yet exoticising register, which inverts the technique of The Sopranos by making the warmth and fluency of the gang seem contained by the proprieties of adulthood. It brings with it a control-tower angle of vision that subtly distorts familiar language...

Beautifully imagined in a pitch-perfect social satire

Alan Warner is the author of six other novels: Morvern Callar, These Demented Lands, The Sopranos, The Man Who Walks, The Worms Can Carry Me To Heaven and The Deadman's Pedal. He is Writer in Residence at Edinburgh University.

The Sopranos are back: out of school and out in the world, gathered in Gatwick to plan a super-cheap last-minute holiday reunion. Kay, Kylah, Manda, Rachel and Finn are joined by Finn's equally gorgeous friend Ava and are ready to go on the rampage. 
 
Will it be Benidorm or Magaluf, Paris or Las Vegas? One thing is certain: the girls will have a hell of a time getting there. Pitch perfect, darkly comic and brimming with life - in all its squalor, rage, tears and laughter - this is an unforgettable story of female friendship. 
 
Longlisted for the 2010 Man Booker Prize.

The Sopranos

Now a stage musical, Our Ladies of Perpetual Succour, adapted by Lee Hall (Billy Elliott, War Horse) and directed by Vicky Featherstone (Artistic Director of the Royal Court Theatre)

In a spill of vivid and corruscating language... Alan Warner has emerged as a writer of great inventiveness

Wonderful... humane, unique, a page-turner with a neat series of bombshells at the end

Warner provides every nuance of the characters in a sustained tour de force... This is the most profound of Warner's books. His sense of place and atmosphere remains extraordinarily intense

Wonderful... Humane, unique, a page-turner with a neat series of bombshells at the end

Wickedly funny... Warner can combine literary style with go-anywhere demotic humour... Like St Trinians with condoms and male nudity

More wild fun from the outrageously talented bright young thing

This is the most profound of Warner's books

Alan Warner is the author of six other novels: Morvern Callar, These Demented Lands, The Man Who Walks, The Worms Can Carry Me To Heaven, The Stars in the Bright Sky, which was longlisted for the 2010 Man Booker Prize, and The Deadman's Pedal. He is Writer in Residence at Edinburgh University.

NOW A SELL-OUT PLAY: OUR LADIES OF PERPETUAL SUCCOUR 
 
The choir from Our Lady of Perpetual Succour School for Girls is being bussed to the national finals in the big, big city. And it's an important day for The Sopranos - Orla, Kylah, (Ra)Chell, Amanda Konky and Fionnula (the Cooler) - pub-crawling, shoplifting and body-piercing being the top priorities. Then it's time to lose that competition - lose, because a nuclear sub has just anchored in the bay and, tonight, the Man Trap disco will be full of submariners on shore-leave. There is no time for delays. . . 
 
But after the fifth bottle of alco-pop up the back of the bus it's clear that all is not going to plan, for anyone. The Sopranos are never going to be the same. 
 
'Compassionate and riotously funny. It is a long time since I read a novel which had me rocking with laughter' -The Times

These Demented Lands

'Alan Warner has a gift greater than the gift of telling a story. He can make what he chooses to tell us seem like a story we were waiting to hear' - Adam Mars-Jones, Observer

Warner's second novel is a classic like his first one... glorious... powerful

A moving evocation of post- apocalyptic rave culture in the West Highlands of contemporary Scotland

Prodigious powers of invention... marvellously dynamic prose... brilliant visual imagination... A greatly ambitious novel

Think of the inventiveness of Iain Banks filtered through the lurid lens of a David Lynch, with a soundtrack from Verve and Bob Dylan... These Demented Lands is fiction 'on the Outer Rim of everything'. Rave on, child

With a style that fuses poetic discipline with the riff-based scat of a hedonist

A novel that follows the trajectory of a drug trip: luminous, hallucinatory and utterly illogical. There is unlikely to be a more original, or hysterically imagined, book published this year

Alan Warner is the author of six other novels: Morvern Callar, The Sopranos, The Man Who Walks, The Worms Can Carry Me To Heaven, The Stars in the Bright Sky, which was longlisted for the 2010 Man Booker Prize, and The Deadman's Pedal. He is Writer in Residence at Edinburgh University.

'A sequel to his acclaimed début Morvern Callar, These Demented Lands, confirms that Alan Warner boasts an extravagant talent... This novel is set on a Scottish island that contains a variety of weird landmarks and an hallucinogenic cast of characters - including a DJ who wants to set up the rave to end all raves, a visitor whose job is to assess candidates for sainthood and the wonderfully unfazed heroine, Morvern Callar' - Harry Ritchie, Mail on Sunday 
 
A powerful, hilarious and original novel about the intersection of lives in the rough and ready communities and wild landscapes of the Scottish Highlands.

Alan Warner

NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE 
 
The choir from Our Lady of Perpetual Succour School for Girls is being bussed to the national finals in the big, big city. It's an important day for The Sopranos, with pub-crawling, shoplifting and body-piercing being the top priorities. And with a newly anchored nuclear sub in the bay, the Man Trap disco will be full of submariners on shore-leave tonight. There is no time for delays – or even for winning… 
 
But after the fifth bottle of alco-pop on the bus it's clear that all is not going to plan, for anyone. The Sopranos are never going to be the same.

Alan Warner

Books by Alan Warner

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